Confidence Is Most Important Psychological Skill for Athletes

Regardless of the sport, the most important psychological quality an athlete needs to perform at his or her personal best is confidence. New research investigating the effects of four important “athletic coping skills” has found that confidence has the greatest impact on performance.

The skills that have generally been identified as improving subjective qualities of athletic performance are confidence, freedom from worry, coachability, and goal setting. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia studied these skills along with athletes’ self-perceptions of performance in a study with 610 participants.

Data for the study were collected over a five-year period, from athletes of various races and both sexes on a large college campus. The majority of the athletes were good students, with GPAs of 3.0 or above. In addition to studying athlete’s coping skills as related to sports, the researchers asked them about their own perceptions of their performance and how they believed their coach ranked them.

The athletes who were the most confident rated their performance better than others about 7% of the time. Freedom from worry was also associated with improved performance.

Coachability and goal setting were negatively related to performance. That is, the most coachable athletes reported their performance as worse than average, as did those most likely to set goals.

Because the study found associations but did not investigate the reasons for those associations, the cause-and-effect relationships here remain to be explored by future research. Athletes with weaker physical abilities may naturally compensate by listening more carefully to coaches, resulting in the greater coachability of underperforming athletes. On the other hand, it may be that something about coachability actually leads to reduced athletic performance.

Similarly, this study found that confidence is directly related to athletic performance. That’s not surprising–the best athletes have plenty of reason to be confident about their performance. Whether increasing confidence can increase performance remains to be seen, but athletes and their coaches might want to consider how to boost confidence and shed worry in order to gain a competitive edge.

This study of the psychology of athletic performance was reported in the June 2010 issue of the Journal of Sport Behavior.